Pablo Fernandez

Month: September 2009

  • NetBeans could make the Ruby on Rails experience great

    NetBeans could make the Ruby on Rails experience great for the vast majority of developers who are using Windows, where installing Ruby, Rails, PHP, MySQL, Python, etc is always a pain and the end result is ugly. But it falls short in some important ways which turned my experience with it into a nightmare. The…

  • Reviewers in a WordPress blog

    In an effort to increase the quality of this blog I’ve engaged a couple of friends in reviewing my posts before they go out. I’m after typos, grammar and also “Are you serious? are you going to publish that crap?” or “You are going to get into trouble with that”. The best way to do…

  • Deferred Twitter posting

    Here’s an idea for those Twitter clients, web and desktops out there: deferred posting. One tweet per hour during eight hours is much more effective than 8 tweets in a row. But sometimes you want to write eight tweets in a row and I find two reasons to do that. You are using Twitter professionally,…

  • It's time for search and replace

    Web browsers, like Firefox or Chrome, are no longer document viewers, but application platforms. I’d like to see browsers start to implement search and replace. Of course not modifying the page, just replacing the matching strings in forms. I’m really surprised it’s not implemented yet. In the last two weeks I needed this feature about…

  • Formating strings in C#, like in Python

    I like Python’s way to format strings because you can use it everywhere, it’s part of the strings. You can do print(“Welcome %s!” % user.name) as you can do Console.Writeln(“Welcome {0}!”, user.Name) But then in Python you can also do randomMethodThatTakesAString(“Welcome %s!” % user.name) In C# it gets trickier, because the call to Console.Writeln takes…

  • The 7 facts of lists of N things

    1 Lists of N things are a joke For most lists, saying that they are a joke is a derogatory statement which might as well be true. For this one, instead, because this is tha list, it’s true. This is a joke built out of Paul Graham‘s essay The List of N Things. If you…

  • The advantages of OpenID

    OpenID has many advantages. For the average user, the main one is not having to remember a thousand passwords. That’s obvious. But also consider not having to remember the username. Many web sites use the email address as username and that’s nice, but many don’t. And most people are not lucky enough to have a…

  • Complexity of writing software

    There seems to be a lot of discussion about software complexity, and although I think many people are talking about different stuff, here’s my take on it. We often compare writing software with other professional disciplines, like civil engineering and medicine, which allows us to pick at possible futures of writing software. I believe writing software…